Another Cloudy Morning

It's Saturday.  The sky once again is a stuffy grey and the damp air sticks to everything.  I heard rain in the night, but this morning all that's falling is mist.  Ben is on a trip, and I am tired.  I've been tired since school started, as if I were the one in a new classroom for more hours than I've ever been away from my mom, with 20 kids I don't know.  I'm not the one with a huge list of sight words to learn nor the one who just started preschool either.  But somehow, I am the one who is exhausted.  And maybe packing lunch and snack every day, thinking newly about what we need in the cupboards, filling out and keeping track of a ridiculous amount of paper work that public school requires, focusing on getting people here and there and everywhere on time, staying on top of homework for the first time ever, and adjusting to this new life overall is more work thank it seems like it should be.  But in any event, I am tired and my patience's running thin.  Right now Silas and Eden are calling from the other room, but I don't feel like putting a drop cloth down in their room so they can paint on the easel.  I don't feel like getting up and washing out Eden's brush because she painted in the red with the gold brush, I don't feel like fielding complaints ("MOM!  Eden is painting all OVER the easel!!").  I don't even feel like sitting on the couch and reading aloud.  What I'd really like to do is sit quietly at the kitchen table with the three days worth of newspapers that have built up and read them, then take a nap, then go down to the beach to walk alone.  That's what I feel like doing.  But today, like so many pieces of so many days, has nothing to do with what I FEEL like doing.  Today has to do with showing up for the day that was born into my hands this morning.  Today has to do with trying to speak in a nice voice and praying for patience when I have none, digging hard because I know it can come.  Today is about forcing myself to stare at Silas and Eden and see their small noses and little faces and hear them speak without R's ("let's get in the caw"), to see that today they still are small.  Today is about getting up from here and even though it's Saturday, packing a lunch for them and walking to the elementary school to meet with Silas's teacher because that's what I said I'd do.  And even if the whole day feels like slogging, I will slog because these are the people I love, and love as we so quickly learn, has little to do with what we feel like, and has much to do with slogging when what we'd most like to to is press mute and climb into bed for just a little nap.